PJ Harvey is returning to Australasia in January with her full 10-piece band for 7 shows in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Wellington and Brisbane. These will be PJ Harvey’s first live dates in Australia and New Zealand since 2012, with a show that is receiving rave reviews from audiences in the US and across Europe. Tickets available from Thursday 1 September.

Written by Zanda Wilson on August 31, 2016British singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist PJ Harvey has announced that she’ll make her triumphant return to Australia in 2017.

Harvey will bring her unique musical passions down under for the first time since 2012, ready to delight Australian audiences once again, with her full 10-piece band in tow, for shows across Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

In her 25+ year career, PJ Harvey has gathered countless accolades including an MBE for services to music, has worked alongside Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, Björk and more, as well as spending significant time working on her visual projects, poems and writing.

Harvey’s ninth studio album The Hope Six Demolition Project was released earlier this year, giving her plenty of ammo to take on her five show tour across the country. Tickets on sale Thursday, 1st September

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PJ Harvey is playing two shows in New Zealand SIMON SWEETMANLast updated 12:55, August 31 2016

OPINION: Exciting news today – PJ Harvey will play two shows in New Zealand in January, 2017.

PJ Harvey is one of the great artists in – and of – modern music.

In mourning the loss of heroes like Bowie and Prince this year, and with people talking about all the talent dying or drying up, we need little reminders of the truly great artists still delivering, still finding new ways to communicate their message and new clothes to dress their sounds in.

PJ Harvey is that rare talent – each album building on, but entirely separate from the one it follows. Each album its own new story, or set of stories if you prefer.

The amazing new record – The Hope Six Demolition Project – is the backbone of PJ Harvey's new show. If you're thinking of going to see her you need to get on with this record.

It's one of the best albums of the year for me and a must-have at any rate, but to see and hear the material from it presented live is going to be one of those unique concert moments; transcendence.

I travelled to Sydney in late 2004 to see PJ Harvey. It was the first time I'd travelled specifically for a gig and it was a ripper.

There she was with her guitar and a snarl, two drummers and this huge, glorious sound – practically reinventing rock'n'roll.

Days later she announced an end to touring – went into (relative) hiding and reinvented herself. She returned a few years later and of course returned to the stage but the guitar-based rock'n'roll-delivering PJ was gone.

In place were dulcimers and pianos and then Let England Shake, one of my favourite albums by anyone ever, brought further new textures and layers. And so it is again with Hope Six. PJ plays the saxophone. PJ writes music-as-documentary, as a form of journalism.

A consummate artist with reinvention being pursued for the sake of the music rather than publicity.

Get your tickets – they go on sale tomorrow – and prepared to be wowed.

There are no coincidences with Polly Jean Harvey. What she offers on record and stage, in her sonic and visual presentation, is not just carefully thought-out but minutely calibrated.

You can hear it in the way the older songs – in a set dominated by her recent albums of history reworked and the present coloured in as history – were all drawn from stories that could easily be mythic or folk tales.

You can see it in the band drum-marching on stage in formation like a firing squad approaching its task; the striking line walked between elegance and rags, will-o'-the-wisp and solidity in her costume; right down to the way every band member held position for seconds in the dark at the end of each song until she moved.

It's true that it was an accident of timing that we in Sydney were seeing her on the same weekend where millions of women (and not a small number of men) marched around the world to both protest against a misogynist demagogue thinly disguised as a president, and to remind him and themselves that he and his kind do not define them.

However, that political bastardry was not unforeseen or even new to this month, this past year or this generation. And this theatrical, dramatic, physical and intellectually vibrant performance was ready – and had been ready in some ways for decades – to be the show-in-response.

A show where not only was Harvey surrounded by an all-male band and their massed voices but the sounds often played in "masculine" tropes of heaviness in percussion, guttural undertones from saxophone in particular and martial beats. One where songs were filled with the after-shocks from, the remnants of, the resistance to often-brutal "masculine" behaviour in government offices as much as armoured personnel carriers or bombers.

Not that any of it can be broken down to something as simple as confrontation or resistance or sublimation or contrast. Harvey, who spoke only once, to introduce the band, sang in varied voices: high and vulnerable, earthy and powerful, inveigling and demanding.

Around her for much of the first hour at least those saxophones – three players, including Harvey who at times would retreat to her "post" alongside the other two during songs – and the percussion, rather than guitars defined the texture more than any of the reportage-style lyrics of the songs from her most recent album.

And when the bass and guitars asserted themselves in The Ministry Of Social Affairs and 50ft Queenie, even the slow soul devouring of Down By The Water, there was vigour and strong insinuation in equal measure. Credit here too must be given to the quality of the sound, not just from her engineer but to this new room.

It was exhilarating, the room filled but not overtaken by the controlled cacophony, that could surge to power but at all times retained definition and even an element of delicateness.

When the set ended with the low pulsing, fragile but never merely ethereal River Anacostia – a kind of by the rivers of Babylon lament for an almost forgotten land free of all manner of corruption – space hung everyone on stage and off.

When, after a rather long delay, they returned for the encore, the percussive, rhythmic take on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited redefined it in a way that put the body at the centre of the experience.

Theatrically expressive with hands and face and body, sometimes in precise extensions of liturgical dance, Harvey was mesmerising. She was equal parts Bowie, Kate Bush and Bjork but new again. As good as any of them and renewed again.

Thank you! That's a fascinating light cast on our discussion about feminism elsewhere - albeit I'm sure not Polly's intention at all, not that that matters. It would be lovely to know how she feels about, or whether she's even aware of, becoming the Voice of the Resistance, sort of Katniss Everdeen with a saxophone rather than arrows. I mean, I think it's great, but it must be bizarre.